


Proved Only By Fire

by Ganymeme



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Flame Alchemist Riza Hawkeye AU, Gen, Suicidal Ideation (mention), War Crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 03:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18217820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ganymeme/pseuds/Ganymeme
Summary: Her mistake, Riza has come to realize, was in thinking that her father was someone admirable. That it was good and right to give yourself over in entirety to some higher, empyrean purpose.Berthold Hawkeye has no need of apprentices when he has a daughter, dedicated and loyal. (Riza inherits her father's legacy. It is not an easy burden.)





	Proved Only By Fire

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a happy fic, but also not as graphic as the tags might make it sound. I've been sitting on it for months, though, and figured I'd finally post it. Many thanks to @Aubergion for being a sounding board and beta!

_Q. What is the life of metals? What is their death?_

_A. It is no other substance than fire, when they are as yet imbedded in the mines. Their life and death are in reality one principle, for they die as they live, by fire, but their death is from a fire of fusion._

His hands shook, palsied and frail, up to the very moment of his death. What had begun as a trembling was by the end a ceaseless quake. Three years later, as Riza reaches for the neck of the bottle, it is his hands that she sees in the tremor of her own. It is his hands, liver-spotted and soot-stained, shaking as he (she) tries to get the lighter to spark, cigarette clumsy and stale on her (his) lips.

He is sitting there with her, in the dark before the grey dawn, hunched over on the empty cot, holding up a glass of whiskey to an unseen lamp. There are no ice cubes to chatter against the side of the glass here, but the dizzying fog of memory whispers the sound well enough. It is dark in her tent, but if she lids her eyes and looks sideways, she sees the shine of lamplight in amber liquid.

 _Perfection_ , he is saying as she tries and tries and tries to spark the lighter, _is the alchemical distillation of all matter, all form, into its purest elements. From solid into liquid, liquid into gas, gas into_ fire.

 _An alchemist_ , he says, _pursues perfection—in theory and then in application. Any fool can add a spark to tinder, or draw the water from the log. I seek what the ancients sought: that which burns at the core of all existence, the sulphuric essence, the salamander's heart. Alchemy, dear Riza, at its highest levels is the art of understanding: through comprehension, control; through control, mastery; through mastery, perfection._

~

Her father's mistake had been believing that fire could ever be controlled. His research consumed him, burnt him up from the inside out, leaving a withered husk of a man long before he drew his last choking, bloody breath.

Her mistake, Riza has come to realize, was in thinking that her father was someone admirable. That it was good and right to give yourself over in entirety to some higher, empyrean purpose.

He died thinking he had failed. The dementia had hidden his genius from him, genius that Riza found buried within fragmented notes written in a shaking hand, the last shards of a shattering mind. Long-held theories proven at last, a tangle of intricate symbology and equations, molecular formulas and elemental sigils: he had found the secrets he had sought for so long and still they eluded him. 

Deciphering it all had been weeks of effort, weeks she could have (should have) better spent sorting out the tangle of bills and debts and creditors. When finally she slotted it all together and that final proof—elegant in its mathematics, so simple, _too_ simple—stared up at her, she had wept. Wept, as she had not at the hospital, or the morgue, or the burial.

The only work left unfinished had been the final array, the practical expression of the theory. 

_An array,_ he always said, _is only as useful as the alchemist's understanding. This obsession with arrays, and the building of arrays, it is a modern disease. The creation and activation of an array should be a final, glorious step. A grand ceremony, a culmination of great work. It should be transcendent, reverent. Sacred. Not something sketched in chalk to fix a trinket, or drawn on paper to be thrown aside._

Certainly her devotion may have been worthy of his beloved ancients, when she built the array. Days and nights spent drawing and redrawing, until her fingers bled and the house was foreclosed. The only witnesses to its completion were her and the silent, mildewed walls of the cheap West City flat.

That array haunted her dreams for months after: black ink angles and curves, a mote of indigo-blue flame dancing in the air, the stink of ozone in her nose, and the warped floorboards digging into her knees. It was brutal and breath-taking, and entirely without purpose. 

~

 _Flick, flickflick._ No spark. She curses, throws the lighter at the tent wall. Tears the cigarette from her lips and throws that too; buries her face in her hands, digs the heels of her palms into her eyes. It burns, so she presses harder, lets iridescent stars shatter across the backs of her eyelids. If she presses hard enough, she almost doesn’t notice the tremor.

A dying man’s last wish, she had told herself. Doing her duty, a good daughter to the last, continuing on her father’s work. Carrying it on with the same obsessive attention to detail, hearkening to the demands of _perfection_.

Well. Before she _perfected_ the art of burning children alive, she would have said her father’s work deserved every waking breath she has given to it, every sacrifice she has made.

She drops her hands from her face and blinks the afterimages away. Reaches for the bottle of too-warm moonshine and drains the last of it, chases off her father’s shade with the liquor’s burn. Drops the bottle to the ground and curses, low and vicious. Presses her hands to her knees and wraps her fingers tight around them, wills them to stop shaking as her knuckles whiten. 

She doesn’t remember what her hands looked like, before the desert sun and desert wind. Before she knew the weight of a gun and the ignition points of sand and clay and human flesh. The array, her array, _their_ array, isn’t purposeless anymore. She—it, really, she’s only here because of _it_ —is a weapon now, given aim and direction by the silver chain on her hip.

A tired bugle sounds out in the distance, rousing the camp as dawn draws near. Rumour has it that the war’s nearing a close. The common soldiers don’t seem to believe it, but Riza’s seen the maps, seen the land. There’s not much of Ishval left to burn, and that frightens her. She doesn’t know who she’s become, doesn’t know who she is outside of the canyons of flame-blackened desert stone.

She doesn’t think she wants to know.

Perhaps, when the time comes she’ll just lay down here in this land she’s scoured of all life and use the damned array one last time, to light one last fire.

But for now, she has a job to do. A higher purpose to chase, one dressed up in blue and gold. Rationally she knows it’s a monstrous one, but she is her father’s daughter, and neither of them ever knew how to stop.

_The three prime substances are proved only by fire, which manifests them pure, naked, clean, and simple. In the absence of all ordeal by fire, there is no proving of a substance possible. For fire tests everything, and when the impure matter is separated the three pure substances are displayed_

_\- The Book of Vexations: the Science and Nature of Alchemy and What Opinion Should be Formed Thereof_

**Author's Note:**

> This is definitely one of the stranger things I've ever written, I think, and while I've got plenty of _ideas_ for this AU, I don't have any definite plans to continue with at the moment. Thanks for reading! <3


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